How should teachers deal with the Trump presidency in their classrooms? Tough question. Genuinely tough question. The campaign was a hard enough call in the classroom, what with its graphic accusations of Trump’s history of sexual predation and the allegation that Hillary should be spending time in jail, not in the White House. But now the election is over. Trump is president. How should teachers discuss the president elect in class?
Before delving into the present, I want to take a look at a classroom controversy during Obama’s first year. It came in September, 2009, when Obama planned to give a back-to-school talk to the nation’s children. The first President Bush delivered a similar talk in 1991. Before him, in 1988, Reagan did the same. No major fuss was raised about either event, accusing those presidents of trying to brainwash impressionable children with partisan speechifying. But the anti-Obama scream machine cranked its outrage up to eleven, calling the speech part of Obama’s agenda to corrupt the youth of America, as if classrooms across the country were giving the Grand Wizard of the KKK an hour to poison innocent minds. The topic dominated the news for days. The result was, some schools refused to air the speech, others gave teachers the option, and many said students could only watch if they had a permission slip from their parents, like a speech from Obama was the equivalent of an R-rated movie.
So anyone who says teachers and everyone else should simply say Trump is our president and he represents all of us needs to remember Obama’s back-to-school speech and the never-ending Tea Party outrage directed at our current president. To tell people to cool it about Trump is to say, “We all need to respect the president, starting . . . NOW.”
Some teachers believe, as I do, that Trump and what he represents has the potential for being the worst thing that’s happened to this country in our lifetime. Others are overjoyed with the election results. I don’t think teachers should walk into the classroom and launch into diatribes about their opinions on the election. But the Trump presidency and its ramifications is a fit subject for spirited, even controversial classroom discussion.
If there are instances of bullying at school related to the agenda Trump pushed during his campaign, those issues deserve a complete, open airing. If some students seeing Hispanic students start chanting, “Build a wall. Build a wall,” if some students seeing students of Middle Eastern dissent shout, “Terrorist, get out of my country!” those are direct results of the campaign. Schools should condemn those students’ actions and punish them for their behavior, but schools are also justified, I would say almost duty bound educationally, to relate the incidents back to Trump’s rallies which encouraged that kind of behavior. To do anything less would be to pretend our president elect never said what, in fact, he said over and over.
Teachers should be able to conduct open discussions about the election in their classrooms, allowing all students to speak their minds while encouraging them to be civil and listen carefully to one another. Teachers should make every attempt to fact check student assertions, if not in real time, since that’s not always possible, then in the days following. Scrutinizing what students have heard and what they believe to be true is an invaluable educational lesson in today’s world where truth can be the first casualty of politics. An open discussion in the (we hope) safe environment of the classroom allows students to reach informed conclusions. It encourages what is best about a democratic process where the freedoms of speech and opinion are encouraged.
If a student asks a teacher what he/she thinks of the election results, the teacher has the right to say, “That’s not something I want to discuss in class,” but teachers should also have the right to tell students their honest opinions, making sure to include the fact that close to half the electorate, including some of the students in the room and their parents, hold the opposite view.
An article published a few days ago by Frederick Hess and Chester Finn, Jr., conservatives who write about education, is titled, Stop Teaching Anti-Trump Bias. An answer from Kevin Carey, an education policy analyst on the left, is titled, Teachers Should Tell the Truth About Trump. It’s an important discussion which will be going on for a long time, and one without clear, easy answers.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2016.
Full disclosure, for those who might mistake this as a comment coming from the right wing: I am a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton, Obama, Sanders (in the 2016 presidential preference election), and Jill Stein (in the 2016 presidential general election).
Safier writes, “The campaign was a hard enough call in the classroom, what with its graphic accusations of Trump’s history of sexual predation and the allegation that Hillary should be spending time in jail, not in the White House.”
If Safier thinks teaching Trump in a public school classroom was challenging, he should have tried teaching social studies (including “current events,” US government and US history) to upper elementary students in a Catholic school run by an order of nuns during the Monica Lewinsky – Bill Clinton scandal. I could make reference here to some of the things the mainstream media reported which occurred in the Oval Office during that period which we could not discuss in our classroom, but then this comment would probably get deleted by the TW editorial staff for obscenity.
Who does Safier think he’s kidding with his “fact checking” and his “respect for the truth” rhetoric? I’ll believe he has a healthy respect for those things when he starts fact checking H.T. Sanchez and his fan-girl Kristel Foster, whom he laughably endorsed for a second term of poor governance and negligent oversight in TUSD. Safier is so compromised, so biased, so unfair, and so dishonest in his reporting I would shudder to think of him having the responsibility of forming young people’s thoughts on U.S. politics or trying to lead an “impartial” discussion of “facts” in a classroom.
Change your panties, Safier. Everything will be fine.
Tell them the truth. You lost because your ideas sucked.
That Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party were exposed to be totally corrupt and colluded with major media to lie to the American people in an attempt to rig the election. And that Americans rejected those values overwhelmingly.
You shouldn’t have to “tell” the school children anything — they should be able to read, write and use critical thinking skills themselves to figure out what is going on in the world around them; Oh wait, we’re in Arizona where education, especially the education of future voters, has a lower priority than releasing unsuspecting Mountain Goats into the same mountains where they just released hungry Mountain Lions. So I guess we just hand them a piece of paper with an outline of the state and a red crayon and tell them to color it in without going outside the lines.
When teachers stray from teaching facts to opinion they enter the non-education realm of indoctrination. The only fact we have at this time is that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States on November 8, 2016 with a clear majority of the only body that counts in our election, the Electoral College. Enough Americans under the current process voted in sufficient numbers to place him in a position to be elected.
So here’s a lesson that can be taught at the appropriate grade level: What is the Electoral College, Why is this means we use to elect presidents, and for discussion Should we consider doing away with it and use the popular vote to select our president?
Many of us are dismayed by Trump’s election. Many of us would have been equally dismayed by the election of Hillary Clinton. Many of us are dismayed that as Ochsian Liberals (“Love me, I’m a liberal) and Progressives our votes don’t matter in the State of Arizona just as many of our conservative friends are dismayed that their votes don’t matter here in the Baked Pueblo.
So here’s another lesson to be taught at the appropriate grade level: How are congressional districts drawn up? Why are the outlines of the districts so weird? If the popular opinion of Congress is so low, why do the same members of congress and senators keep being elected?
See? No weeping and gnashing off teeth. No barely contained fits of rage. No whining and cries of victimization. Discussion of elections and politics can be held without jumping off the cliff of confusing education with indoctrination.
To the parents who illegally brought their children into our country, shame on you for the predicament you have put them in because you wouldn’t obey our laws. And to the politicians that lured them here for the government money that follows them, the Grijalva mob and their white guilt liberal lemmings, double shame on you for exploiting these children . Look at the mess you have created.
No teacher with professional integrity uses a captive audience of schoolchildren to broadcast their political opinions. If you want to brainwash people, go join a cult. Otherwise, have a modicum of respect for the students in your classroom and teach subject content as you are being paid to do.
That very few liked Hillary. She’s a liar, she’s mean, has an insatiable thirst for power and screeches.
The usual suspects vent their hate filled comments and no one (hardly) touches on the best point raised by the article which is: when you have a Bully-In-Chief, how do you teach kids not to bully? The election has just made hypocrites out of every teacher who says that one can’t get ahead through bullying, being egotistical or mean-spirited. And I won’t even relate that to the TUSD election, after audiences have watched a local version of this play out twice a month in the Board room. Oh, and don’t forget retaliation, thats a presidential (and superintendential) characteristic that is a little hard to teach around as well.
That the American people didn’t want the tag team of sexual predators, Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, in the white house preying on staffers’ daughters and interns.
BPH – instead of the cowardly throwing out “hate filled comments”, point exactly to a comment that is hate filled, not truth based. Oops – you forgot to throw in ‘racist’. You’re slipping.
Bully-In-Chief – the one who says you bring a knife to the political fight? The one who says you punish your enemies? The one that said his own white grandmother had reactions bred into her? The one that says he has a pen, didn’t need a congress, the American people?
You forget, Betts, that Safier, like other Democratic Party tools, doesn’t bother to watch Board meetings in which the behavior of the elected officials he sees fit to endorse can be observed. Nor does he bother to spend time on the sites in the district, seeing the direct effect negligent governance and bad administration has on teachers and students in the schools (and making himself aware of cases of top-down retaliation, where they happen). He takes orders from the powers that determine which candidates are sufficiently compliant and submissive, and he goes to work promoting them or, (if they are in office) excusing their behavior and failing to report relevant information to voters.
He may toss a worthy candidate who is independent of the insider-controlled machine a bone here and there, but if he does so it will be in language that makes clear what a concession he is making to deign to endorse someone who has shown herself to be insufficiently pragmatic (read: compliant).
So much for Safier, and so much for voters and citizens both locally and nationally, who have not exercised the due diligence or invested the effort necessary at the grass roots organizing level to ensure that our mainline political parties will not repeatedly put forward and promote, at the expense of better candidates, morally compromised individuals unfit to lead.
One can hope that the results of the 2016 elections will be a wake up call both locally and nationally, but to hope that might be naive, in light of what has been observed. Those who’ve been paying attention have been receiving wake up calls for some years now, but no matter how loud the alarm is sounded, we seem to have arrived at a place where the majority of voters will either not hear the call, or will respond in a way that seems unlikely to arrive improve their situations.
(FYI, Safier, in case you were unaware: the results of the 2016 Pima County elections are scheduled to be certified by the Pima County Board of Supervisors today. At last count, Stegeman and your friend Kristel Foster had regained their seats and results for the third and last available seat were as follows: Sedgwick 50,205, Putnam-Hidalgo 49,519)
Silly Safier, Americans don’t remember anything that happened 7 years ago. How do you think the Republicans got back into the White House?
Time to crank up the war machine back and run the economy into the ditch. Then they’ll spend another 8 years viciously attacking whatever Democrat gets elected to clean up the mess.
David,
Perhaps, just perhaps, the election of so many Republicans across America will be the beginning of the end of the strangle-hold unions have on education. If so, a much brighter future will greet the youth of America and do much to “to make America great again;” to barrow Donnie’s campaign slogan.
Bslap. I think you have that backwards.
CW13 – Bslap must have been talking about Obama’s war, the “right” war, the ‘good war’. 7 years ago he announced the massive build up of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Dec. 1, 2009.
“President Obama announced his new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan in a speech Tuesday night, vowing to deploy 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as quickly as possible and setting July 2011 as a date to begin pulling U.S. forces out of the country.”
“This was the night when Barack Obama took full ownership of the war in Afghanistan,” he (Bob Seifert) said.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-lays-out-new-afghanistan-strategy/
hahaha these kids don’t know crap neither does majority of America. Why don’t you teach them the REAL enemy. While everybody is worried about who’s president they have totally forgot our government structure. Legislation runs this country. Congress having unlimited terms. Where congress get influenced by lobbyists by money, stocks and campaign funds. So our country is a giant faade. Congress makes choices based off of how much money they can make and not for what’s best for America. EVERY congressional member is corrupt and it can be proven in public records.
You want real change? You need to study the constitution.
Article 5.
method of proposing Amendments can be done when two-thirds of all State
legislatures request that Congress convene a special Constitutional Convention
that will be made up of delegates that will propose Amendments. In both
cases, any proposed Amendments will then be sent on to the State
legislatures for ratification.
Means it can be ratified without congressional approval to impose term limits on congress at a state level.
Get that in your thick skulls. For the last 30 years they have ruined our country not the presidents.
Article 5
Imagine if all voters were required to have the same minimal understanding of US government that is required of all new citizens. How many could name event the three branches of government? Describe how a bill becomes a law? Most of us learned this in junior high school. The president elect seems a bit confused with both of these basic tenets so it might be expecting too much of the average citizen. “An informed citizenry?” Right.
How about “crime doesn’t pay?”